Bid to end breast screening

The man who helped to set up the NHS breast screening programme claims today that it does more harm than good.

For an alternative view on breast screening, by a woman who claims it saved her life, click on the link in the box below.

Professor Michael Baum, a leading expert in the field, said that screening for the disease causes hundreds of healthy women to have risky, mutilating and unnecessary treatments even when they may never develop the disease.

Fifteen years after he established one of the first screening centres in the UK, Professor Baum has now called for the £50million a year service to be shut. He believes the techniques used for screening are not accurate enough and lead to too many false alarms.

Professor Baum, who is to address the Royal Society of Medicine in London today, has been a long-standing critic of screening but has never before gone so far as to say it should be scrapped entirely,

He is one of the most eminent breast surgeons in the country and a respected researcher into the disease. His comments have sparked a furious row among experts over the benefits of the NHS breast screening programme, which was established in 1986 and now screens 1.5 million women a year.

Some cancer experts and charities accused him of "twisting figures" and insisted that the UK screening programme is saving 1,000 women's lives a year. One colleague called his views a "triumph of eloquence over scientific fact".

And Julietta Patnick, national co-ordinator of the breast screening programme said: "Professor Baum uses out-of-date and inappropriate data to build his argument against screening. I have to worry that he is costing some women their lives by putting them off coming for screening and that would be monstrous."

Professor Baum raised fears that rather than reducing the number of women who lose a breast because of cancer, screening may actually be increasing the rate.

Nearly 40,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the UK and 13,000 die from the disease.

In an interview with the Standard, Professor Baum said: "Women are being coerced into screening but are not being told the full facts about the risks. The agents of the state say I am a maverick but I am at the sharp end and I see the casualties of screening."

He claims the money would be better spent on funding research and reducingwaiting times for treatment. Professor Baum claims that the programme has to screen 1,000 women over 50 for 10 years for it to save a single life.

"That life is of infinite value and you cannot put a price on that, but the problem is what happens to the thousands of other women who go through false alarms and over-treatment," he said.

He insisted that he did not want to be "a scaremonger or say that screening kills".

The debate over breast screening centres particularly on an early form of cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) which is found in the cells lining the milk ducts of the breast.

Less than half of women will develop life-threatening cancer but because doctors are unable to predict which women with DCIS are most at risk, all those with the condition in several areas of the breast are offered a mastectomy.

Professor Baum said: "As a result, the screening programme cannot claim that there is a net reduction in the mastectomy rate in the population - the opposite might be true."

Dr Robin Wilson, one of the country's leading breast cancer experts, said: "He has no evidence whatsoever that breast screening does more harm than good."

Last year Professor Karol Sikora, visiting professor of cancer medicine at Hammersmith Hospital, added to the debate over cancer treatment by recommending that doctors should be more ready to stop painful chemotherapy for terminally-ill cancer patients, and instead use "cheaper and gentler treatment to relieve pain and improve the quality of his or her final weeks".

He wrote: "There comes a moment - not always, but often enough - when you have to sit down with a patient, or relatives, and say frankly: 'It is for you to decide. Quality of life or length of life?'"